In 2007, we interviewed a woman of Onondaga ancestry who reported that she was the descendant of a woman who had been considered a witch. Possibly during the hard-to-date Onondaga witch scare, this woman fled to Seneca territory near Salamanca, where either her practice or the accusations caught up to her. Eventually she was executed and buried on a hill in Cold Spring—Ga’hai Hill where other witches may have been laid to rest.
Few of the Salamanca Seneca admit knowing of this association to the hill, but there was witch trouble in this area before, as we’ve seen during the time of Cornplanter. And reports of the lights are still around. Residents of Cold Spring, Steamburg, and Salamanca persistently see them on Ga’hai Hill. Many Salamanca motorists are terrified of breaking down anywhere near that hill, even in the section of I-86 that arcs the base.
The Gold of Ga’hai Hill
Allegany Seneca storyteller George Heron (1919–2011) heard most of his tales from an uncle who was born before the Civil War. The interchange included many legends about the ga’hai on Bay State Hill across the river from Cold Spring, about four miles southeast of Red House Lake. The ones Heron’s uncle described floated about as high as a human knee, “like a car headlight but with no explanation.”
Heron’s uncle told a tale about three Union deserters en route to Canada carrying bags of money through the Allegany Reservation. They recruited three young Seneca to round up food and civilian clothing and get them directions to Lake Erie. In payment, the soldiers offered each Seneca a full grab into a bag of gold coins, a fistful that would have been the sum of a lifetime. “But don’t go spending it right away,” they warned as they left. “It’s hot money.”
The joy of the three Seneca was mixed. Their first worry was losing their treasure. Their second was being caught with it. The oldest had a plan: He’d bury it on Ga’hai Hill. He’d fill his pipe at the bottom of the trail, start smoking, and walk with the gold to the top. When the tobacco ran out he’d bury it, and that would be the way to find it again. The three would wait a few years to start spending it. This made sense. “Nobody will poke around for it up there,” they reasoned, because of the dread of the witch lights.
The oldest Seneca did as he had planned, found a tree special enough to remember, and dug. Over the winter he caught an illness and died before he could show his friends to the spot. All anyone knew was that the gold was somewhere on the trail up Ga’hai Hill, about as far as a single pipeful would last.
For years, the two surviving friends prowled Ga’hai Hill, their thirst for gold evidently greater than their fear of witches or lights. After their deaths, one of the men’s sons took up the search. Storyteller Duce Bowen told me this is thought to be a true tale in Salamanca. Even today, when the witch lights are out on the hill, people wonder if the souls of the treasure hunters might be among them, still looking for their gold.
The Boys Who Hooked a Witch Light
One summer evening in the 1930s, two young men from Cold Spring trolled lines from their little boat on the Allegheny River. By dusk, they had some fish to show for their efforts, including a couple of the suckers that were such a delicacy to the family cats. One of them spotted a mysterious light along the nearby railroad tracks. At first, it was a bright sphere moving slowly at ground level. He called to the other to look, and it sped up.
The light hopped to the treetops, came back to the earth, and bounced up again. It made long, majestic arcs, bounding like a luminous ball tossed by a giant along the railroad tracks. It disappeared when it landed on the riverbank. A small fire soon started on the spot. The boys were alarmed to see a shadowy human form in the glow. It could only be a witch. “Let’s get out of here,” one whispered. They paddled as quietly as they could, with occasional backward glances.
The fire on the shore faded into a white light. It came down the bank, entered the water, and came at them under the dark water like a glowing torpedo, making one small wave. It overtook them with such speed that they rested their paddles and watched. It passed under them, scraping the hull and rocking the boat, then drove out into the river and curved back. Again it hit and rocked the boat, this time so wildly that they clung to the sides.
A fishing pole shot up, slapped one boy’s leg, and leaped into the water. “We hooked it!” he cried. It seemed true. As if the witchy light were a swimming wizard who had snatched their line, it and their pole had started following its wake. The light took another bend under the water and came back, this time a bit slower. It shook the boat even harder, splashing in water and pitching one boy on top of the other. Then the unknown force let them go, and they paddled madly for the shore. The light headed in another direction and crept out of the water like an animal. The little fire on the bank started up again, and a shadow form beside it shook like a dog shedding water.
They hauled up the boat, left their catch, and ran to the nearest boy’s home, where they gasped out their story. The father listened impassively and at the end said, “Did you remember to bring the suckers for the cats?” His eyes twinkled above his pipe. He knew they had been teased by a witch light. Mojave-dry wit is an Iroquois characteristic.
ONONDAGA WITCH LIGHTS
Onondaga faith keeper Tony Gonyea is a prominent teacher, elder, and activist whose home base is the reservation near Syracuse. In 2004, I ran into him in a Syracuse bookstore, the legendary Seven Rays, and asked him about witch lights.
Tony started by recalling that he grew up in a home under a hill that was locally famous for these lights, a little like Ga’hai Hill near Salamanca. He disclosed few details, but conceded that some lights had been spotted there in living memory. “My brothers and sisters used to see them all the time when we were kids,” he said. Once they even saw one bouncing down the hill and crossing the yard.
Tony remembered the night that he and a friend had spotted a brilliant light sphere coming down the same wooded hill. It should have been zigzagging because of the dense trees, but its course was as fast and smooth as if it had been immaterial. It couldn’t have been a motorcycle with a single headlight, not moving like that through those woods.
Years later, Tony saw one of these lights, this one bright blue, on the same hill. An adult by then, he was walking home from work in Lafayette at the end of day when he saw it. He studied it as long as he could see it. Then it disappeared like a match burning out, and he took off running to the exact spot. He found what he was sure was the place, a clearing as naturally circular as if the trees had parted in their growth to leave a nurturing space. This would have been a spot the old-timers might have called “a Little People place.”
I pressured him for more details. I asked him why we only hear about the lights in certain hot locations. “I’d say the witch lights are all over the state,” he reflected. “People kind of pay attention to things at a different rate.”
A METAPHYSICAL CONTRACT
Generally good-natured supernatural characters like the European and Native American Little People love it when someone makes a kindly gesture toward them, and they will often dispense good fortune to the giver. Many sinister supernaturals, though, in world folklore can act against someone only after a similar overture. When the unsuspecting human being either offers hospitality to the supernatural one or accepts it in return, that exchange becomes the signature on a metaphysical contract. The gesture that seals the deal can be simple and surprising, but this stricture—the fact that an invitation must be made and accepted—is one of the few fixed protections we mortals have.
Also like the European fairies, the Iroquois Little People are sometimes associated with strange lights, usually different in size, shape, and behavior from the mistrusted witch lights. One must not be treated as the other.
The Girl Who Fed the Witch Lights
One family on the Tonawanda Reservation lived near a railroad bed by which they saw these ga’hai often on winter nights. They thought of them as no more sinister or conscious than supernatural wildlife. As a joke in the 1980s, another child told
one of the family’s daughters that these witch lights were the Little People. The girl “fed” the witch lights, probably by leaving leftovers at spots outside the home where they had been seen.
The lights appeared more often and steadily nearer the house. The neighborhood was soon on edge. One night a neighbor called and told the girl’s mother to look out the kitchen window. She pulled back the curtain and was shocked to see a handful of the lights hovering five feet from the house, as if waiting for someone to open a door and ask them in for a meal. The closest light held a faint, hollow human face. This was an emergency.
One of their neighbors was a Navaho man people remembered only as Marvin. He had married a woman of the Tonawanda Reservation, and he must have seen something of the lights in his own native Southwest. For four nights he camped around the house of the girl who fed the witch lights—burning tobacco, offering prayers, and conducting ceremonies. He couldn’t keep the lights from their habits of favoring train tracks, hills, and winter nights, but they stayed away from this house after that. A worthy medicine man, this Marvin.
GHOSTLY WALKS AND PHANTOM HOSTS
The grandfather of one of my Mohawk confidants was a farmer on the Tonawanda Reservation. In the summers, he and his hands worked till darkness every day in his field near Judge Road. One July dusk, three of them were shutting off the machines in the field when a couple of head-sized light spheres streaked by them, crossing a hundred yards in seconds and disappearing behind the tree line. None doubted what these were: ga’hai.
As they followed the lights with their eyes, they heard an odd sound effect in the wake of their course: dozens of running human feet and people talking to each other in Seneca. It was as if an invisible host of spirits had crossed the open field in the guise of the lights and let the sounds they’d made follow them after.
This strange story sounds particularly antique and European. In Iroquois folklore, the typical witch lights are not often associated with anything but witches, or mystery in general. In the Old World, phantom lights can be presumed to be anything, though most commonly they are thought to be fairies and spirits of the human dead. The fairy host often moves, too, with the sweep and sound of a phantom caravan. Maybe the continents weren’t that far apart, or else the supernatural is the same everywhere, and our accounts vary because we see only pieces of the picture.
The Ghosts of Niagara on the Lake
In July 2005, fifteen people on a Haunted History Ghost Walks tour stopped by a bend in the road in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. The broad green of a lakeside golf course curved around them. Down the slope to their right was the Niagara River; across it in clear sight was the famous Fort Niagara. Ahead of them to the north was the inland ocean, Lake Ontario, and above it, a sky of contrasts. The parting day was stretching peachy fingers into the graying clouds to the left. The air ahead of them was deep indigo. To the east it was already night.
This was Mississauga Point, a site with a dramatic, even mysterious past. Scott Jones, the young tour guide, waved his arm toward the lake across the curving green and told his group about old tunnels between the town and reconstructed Fort Mississauga. He motioned toward the heavy river once lined on both sides with prehistoric castles and helped them imagine historic and possibly ancient battles the site had witnessed. He waved again toward the lake as he mentioned the mystery lights in the sky and the UFO flaps of the 1970s, all above this very point charged by geology, legend, and history. He noticed them looking hard at something closer and along the ground. He turned and stared with them.
A hundred yards away, on and around the site of the old fort, was a flock of possibly a dozen hazy head-sized lights. Everyone saw them clearly. They were strange and eerie. What were they?
The tour group included thirteen young women and a big young fellow who’d been scornful the whole night. He’d laughed at stories about Niagara-on-the-Lake’s ghosts and tried to find natural explanations for all the reports and encounters. Even while studying the head-high, earthbound lights on the course, he kept at it. For sure it was just “a ship on the lake in the distance” with a high mast and a handful of blue lights on it, all moving independently. At first he’d been ready to charge them. At last even he gave up and admitted wonder. They were clearly just above the surface of the land.
The humans could have stared until their eyes glazed over: the witch lights glowed and moved as long as anyone watched, though they were fainter as the group turned to leave. On the back of his sign-up sheet, Jones wrote a statement about the marvel. All his clients signed their names underneath.
Lady of the Blue Light
Two men went fishing in a little boat on the Niagara River well above and south of Niagara Falls. It was summer, and the river was calm. After hours of little luck, they moved on and passed under the Peace Bridge and into the broad mouth of northeastern Lake Erie. Their luck changed quickly. They caught one fish after another.
One fisherman was ready to pack it in. It was getting dark, and there was a different tone in the air. But the owner of the boat insisted on following their fortune. They headed out into the lake and caught more in that one hour than they had the rest of the day.
Then the fog came. Thick clouds pressed down on them, and they lost their bearings. They had no idea how close they were to the nearest shore or which direction it could have been. They couldn’t see any anything but the glowering, ever-darkening gray. Anxiety chilling every vein, they started the motor and headed the boat in a direction they thought was toward land. They couldn’t even be sure they were heading in a straight line. For hours, they wandered lost in the fog.
A stray wave splashed over the side, knocking the host’s spectacles from his eyes. He yelled for his friend to take the wheel while he fumbled for them. As if nothing could go right, even their voices were lost in the wake and fog. They had to shout to each other unless they were side by side. Then they saw the light.
It was a blue sphere that appeared to be static. It had to represent either a big still boat or a solid shore. It was faint, though, and a long way off. The boat owner found his glasses, took over the wheel, and floored the boat, heading to the sphere. It was two in the morning.
Around that time, a little girl woke up crying in a Buffalo home. She had had a dream she couldn’t remember and tried to convince her mother that her father needed help. It was just a nightmare, she was told, and she fell back to sleep.
The boat hit something hard. Both men were pitched into the water. Other than being near a stony shoal, they had no idea where they were.
The blue light was above them, and bright enough to show in its glow someone standing on the rocks. It was a woman, her arm out to the side, the blue light in her hand like a lantern. She was in settler-era native clothing of moccasins, a long dress, and a rope belt from which hung some feathers and a round, dark object like a turtle’s shell. She seemed out of time. One of the men realized, to his astonishment, that the woman had the face of his daughter. Either the fog shifted briefly or the light grew brighter, and the two men were able to see clearly enough to scramble out of the river onto the rocks.
They clambered to the top, ready to thank the oddly dressed woman with the light and ask her if they were on a river or lake, in New York or Canada. But she was gone as if she had never existed. The men had their own problems.
Their craft was damaged, and they stayed where they were. The horrid fog lifted just before dawn, and they found they were on the long break wall that comes out of Buffalo Harbor. When full daylight came, they were shocked to realize that the light had led them to a place not far from where they had set out. They also saw that their boat was partly swamped. Helped by another passing boat, they made it to their truck near the launch, and after that to their homes with a story to tell.
So sure was one of the men that their deliverer had worn his daughter’s face that he sat quietly with the girl some time after the event. He asked her, a seven-year-old, how she had known where to find them on
the Niagara River. It was this little girl who, thirty years later, told us this story, in which many mysteries remain.
What are these mystery lights, anyway, seen so commonly in upstate New York? Our Iroquois friends might call them all witch lights and add a new facet to their legacy or zoology. Others would call them UFOs, spirits, incompletely formed ghosts, or nonsense. Our ghost-hunting friends might even call them orbs if they turn up on film and nowhere else.
Have the Iroquois hit the nail on the head? Is all this stuff a projection of the power people? Is there some realm that sometimes shows itself into this, a realm in which no boundaries exist and all psychic actors—spirits, ghosts, witches, Little People, and the projections of the minds of living humans—are one?
JOE BRUCHAC ON WITCH LIGHTS
As we’ve seen, the Iroquois tend to be suspicious of all moving outdoor lights. For Algonquin groups, only the ones with a greenish cast are likely to be witches or nether beings, thus objects of dread. Lights of pure white are often thought to be clear human souls on their journey after the body’s death.
The Algonquin-speaking Abenakis have a custom that young and confused souls can become lost and need help finding their way to the realm of the ever-blessed. When these innocents come back as tender light forms, they are saved by the big buck deer, who find and catch them with their broad-spreading antlers, race them to the highest hill nearby, and toss them into the hereafter. What a spectacle that would be! Those broad tines linked by streaks of light like an astral cat’s cradle! It’s said that sometimes these beautiful creatures are too good for their own good, mistaking car headlights for human souls that need saving, and rushing into them.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 10